India Boasts World’s Fastest-Growing Economy for Second Straight Year

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is projecting 8.2 percent growth for India in the current fiscal year, a substantial upward revision from earlier estimates and well ahead of the 3.6 percent global growth rate.

If the projection holds up, India will have the fastest-growing economy in the world for the second straight year.

The IMF posted one higher estimate for Indian growth in 2022, around nine percent, but retreated to 8.2 percent to account for disruptions from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Voice of America News (VOA) on Tuesday noted the worldwide economic situation remains volatile, and India’s growth may yet stumble for various reasons:

Economists, however, warn that the uncertainties created by the Ukraine crisis pose a huge challenge in maintaining the momentum as India too grapples with the runaway fuel prices and high food inflation that are hurting countries around the globe.

Another challenge faced by India is that growth is uneven – while jobs and incomes have come roaring back in some sectors, such as information technology, millions who lost livelihoods during the pandemic are still struggling.

“The evidence is reasonably clear that some sectors of the economy are growing much faster than others,” says Ravi Srivastava, director of the Center for Employment Studies at the Institute for Human Development in New Delhi. “This obviously has consequences — employment and earnings have still not recovered. It is only a small segment that is benefiting.”

VOA further noted that India has a “vast informal sector” of employment, which is difficult to monitor or predict because so much of its activity consists of lone entrepreneurs working off the books.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the informal economy was hit hard by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, but is now recovering as the “formal” industries they depend on come fully back online. An example cited by VOA was small independent cabbies reporting “work has been good” as traffic returns to normal at airports.

One troubling sign of the recovery is that India’s rural jobs program – effectively a massive welfare program that pays very low wages for unskilled labor on public works projects – still has about 253 million households enrolled, far above its pre-pandemic level of 186 million. Along with the growth of the “informal” economy, this suggests the quality of Indian jobs has not returned to anything near pre-pandemic levels.

IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva nevertheless judged India’s growth to be a “positive” sign “in a world where growth slowdown is creating a major problem.”

The IMF said India would have to wait a little longer to achieve a $5 trillion economy. In February, analysts believed that milestone could occur during the 2025 fiscal year, but now the IMF projects India’s economy will pass $5 trillion in 2029.

Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Bimal Jalan said in April that India’s high growth rate and “very high” reserves of foreign currency meant the economy is in “good shape.”

Jalan said India’s relatively modest trade with Russia would minimize the risk to India from worldwide sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine. He was, however, troubled by high inflation and rising fuel prices.

The World Bank was a bit less enthusiastic about Indian growth than the IMF, cutting its own forecast for the fiscal year from 8.7 percent to 8 percent due to “supply bottlenecks” plus disruptions from the war in Ukraine.

“High oil and food prices caused by the war in Ukraine will have a strong negative impact on peoples’ real incomes,” World Bank vice president Hartwig Schafer said in April.

The world’s second fastest-growing economy, China, has slowed to 4.4 percent growth in 2022 and is expected to slow further over the coming decade. Some economists believe China could even slip into a recession due to its severe “zero-Covid” coronavirus lockdowns, depressed exports due to the war in Ukraine, the Communist Party’s massive regulatory crackdown on major industries, and the collapsing Chinese real-estate market.